Five Ways to Write Like The Economist [pdf] (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Five Ways to Write Like The Economist [pdf] (2010)

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Those interested in this may like to know that The Economist publishes a style guide in book form:

https://www.amazon.com/Style-Guide-Economist-Books/dp/161039...

Available online as well:

https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/st...

That's just a 20-pages preview

That caught me out for a while too.

I can’t help thinking that they would sell more copies of the full book if they made it clearer in that PDF that it’s just an excerpt!

All good tips, and not just for lawyers. They're all things I try to do.

Calling them "zinger verbs" is really underselling. The general principle is to use words with impact, be they nouns, adjectives, adverbs, or whatever. In the example, "feed" and "sap" and "vault over" are just much more exciting and evocative than "sustain" and "undermine," which are something a bureaucrat would write. "Shuffling along" gives you a mental picture of some old person moving slowly.

I do find The Economist tedious and boring, but that's a problem of its outlook, which aims to never say anything that contradicts conventional wisdom.

One "trick" that I can't stand, but is beloved by news editors (usually at the low end) is to avoid repeating the main noun and to do anything, no matter how awkward, to find another word:

> A water shortage is has been announced. H2O use will be restricted...

> A car factory burned down. The vehicle plant...

It's jarring to repeat a word to often "by mistake" in close proximity [1]. It's not jarring if that's the subject at hand: it's actually more jarring to stretch for a synonym and make the reader follow that you're still taking about the same exact thing!

[1]: Sometimes even the same unusual word repeated within the same book can stand out for the repetition more than for the word itself.

This is known in the craft as monologophobia. Theodore Bernstein, a NYT journalist, who coined the phrase, described a monologophobe as someone 'who would rather walk naked in front of Saks Fifth Avenue than be caught using the same word more than once in three lines of type'.

The most common example is journalists' aversion to repeating words like 'said' or 'told'. People don't _say_ things any more, they: continue, explain, add, verbalise, enunciate, vocalise, and so on.

I think I suffer that...I've edited a few HN comments recently after realising I'd used the same word twice in a sentence. Even the previous sentence's overuse of the first person pronoun is bothering me...

I think it's drummed into people at school not to overuse the same word. However, this is, as usual for school, an oversimplification.

Repetition is to be avoided when it is that repetition itself that stands out unattractively. In the previous sentence, "repetition" is repeated deliberately in order to emphasise that the referred-to noun remains the same[1].

If your grammatical gymnastics to avoid a repetition become more annoying than the repetition itself, just leave it. (Again, I could have found a circumlocution here for "repetition", but would it make things better? Would it have the same nuances? Would it rather distract from the actual meaning of the whole sentence?)

Off-topic (and I do hope not too personal; I don't mean to be a grammar bore when we're not here for the grammar): overuse of ellipses is far more aggravating, to me, when parsing a comment than an unintentional reuse of a common word like "I". It stands out most because I have a colleague who does it all the time and it drives me up the wall as I can't tell if there's a implicit conclusion that I should be intuiting(...)

If I have to pick something I overuse, it would be parentheticals (like this).

[1]: If short on space, you could distil "... when it is that repetition itself that stands out ..." to just "... when it stands out ...", but what "it" represents is now implicit, the whole is more neutral and the emphasis is lost.

Which can be subtly changing the meaning - explain carries more baggage than said, as do some of the others.

The Fowlers called this habit elegant variation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegant_variation

oh so THAT's what that's called! This practice is fine for literature and other forms of art, but I often find people using it in code and comments and like, which find totally counterproductive and unnecessary.

Good comments.

Non-repetition is a style rule that can be broken sometimes and have even more impact.

Speaking of repetition: patent claims have very strict rules about this;

"A packet, comprised of a TCP header and data" -- first use

"The packet" -- all subsequent uses

Everyone who reads claims, when they see "the packet" look to previous claims to find the antecedent basis of "packet." It's always assumed that you introduced the packet earlier. Obviously you must not use a synonym for it.

JFYI, William Saffire on the matter (fumblerules):

If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.

https://dmorgan.web.wesleyan.edu/materials/safire.htm

They do have a certain style.

Once a year or so, in tiny type at the bottom of some column in the magazine, they advertise for interns. An amusing filter.

Should probably add [2010] to the title since several of the examples were from a 2010 copy of the Economist.

It’s interesting to look back in time to see how email spam was still top of the mind in 2010, enough for the Economist to write about it then, considering pg’s “A Plan for Spam” [1] was written 8 years earlier in 2002.

1: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

Email spam was already a known problem when I started using email in 1998. By 2010 I had been using custom email addresses for all my contacts for an entire decade, in an effort to combat spam.

The Economist is my favorite news source, but if anything it’s because of the restraint they show with regards to sensationalism rather than any sort of titillating writing style. In fact, I have used The Economist to help me fall asleep on more occasions than I can count!

There are 5 instances of starting a sentence with But. Perhaps I'm in a minority but I always find that jarring to read.

I think writing modern style guides are divided on it, although they're not something I know much about.

Almost all economist articles go something like 'you might think... because.... BUT... because... which is why X should...'.

Given that, the But pivots the whole article, not a sentence, and it makes sense to allow it to start that section.

The faux-objective version of how so many news and opinion articles start 'forget x, it's all about y'. Or 'don't do this, do that'.

I'm very tired of seeing that format.

The economist meets the standards for a well written publication. However, it has a kind of faux-objective style. Meaning it uses the presentation and style of an objective and scientific publication but has an overwhelming subtext: mindless non-committal liberalism that finds a way into reporting on every issue.

They don't capitalise their acronyms which regularly catches me, forcing a rewind and a re-read; anyone know why not?

They do, but typeset them with small caps.

OK, from <https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/08/28/nasas-newest-ro...>

"The Space Launch System (sls) is the first step..."

does 'sls' look upper or lower case to you?

Upper

Checked it; emacs and ascii tables say lower.

Chars 115 and 108 decimal. Puzzled.

the css specifies a 'smallcaps' font to display as, while the text itself remains lowercase

Ah. But I see miniscules. I also run without js which may be something to do with it. Seems web dev is so highly developed that showing text is becoming passe I guess.

The Economist writing is not what it used to be. I've noticed many more grammatical errors and bad writing in the last 4 years.

Perhaps they have fewer editors?

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